The Economist Articles for Feb. 1st week : Feb 4th(Interpretation)

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The Economist Articles for Feb. 1st week : Feb 4th(Interpretation)

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Leaders | American immigration

How the border could cost Biden the election

To keep Trump out of power, the Democrats need to make an offer on immigration policy

image: getty images

Jan 25th 2024

Donald trump’s mother came from Tong (population 500), a remote Scottish settlement that was once in Viking territory. His grandfather came from Kallstadt (population 1,200), a Bavarian village that produced the Heinz family. Joe Biden’s ancestors came from Ireland and England. In America everyone is from somewhere else—even Native Americans, though they have been there much longer than anyone. Such is the country’s appeal that 160m adults around the world say they would move there, too, if only they had the chance. That is many millions more than most Americans are willing to allow in.

This mismatch is at the heart of the issue that could cost President Biden the election. In 2016 Mr Trump rode “border chaos” all the way to the Republican nomination and then on to the presidency. At the time, he campaigned as if record numbers of migrants were coming across the border illegally. That was not true then, but it is now.

There were nearly 250,000 attempts to cross the southern border in November alone. Most of the newcomers will have sought asylum and been released into America to wait years for their claims to be adjudicated. Since Mr Biden became president, over 3.1m border-crossers have been admitted. That is more than the population of Chicago. At least a further 1.7m have come in undetected or overstayed their visas. Republican governors have paid for migrants to go to places run by Democrats, forcing the problems of the southern border northward. Their experience helps explain why voters trust Republicans to deal with border security by a margin of 30 points. It is the party’s biggest lead on any issue.

This is not all Mr Biden’s fault. When America’s labour market is tight the incentive for people to head there illegally increases. That is why the numbers went up under Mr Trump too, until covid-19 came along and fixed the problem for him. When travel became possible again in 2021, pent-up demand resulted in a surge of people across the southern border. More than half of border-crossers are from countries beyond Mexico and the northern bit of Central America. Venezuelans make up the biggest part of this group. But tens of thousands now fly into the Americas from Russia (43,000 in the year to September 2023), India (42,000) and China (24,000) and then attempt a crossing. Often it is impossible to return them. China will not take back its nationals if their applications are rejected.

However, some of the blame lies squarely at Mr Biden’s door. Mr Trump’s language about Mexico sending rapists across the border and his cruel separation of children from their parents as a deterrent, along with his plan to build the wall, radicalised some Democratic policymakers on immigration. They thought public opinion was on their side. Voters did indeed revolt against Trumpism and while he was in office support for immigration reached a new high. When the new Democratic administration took power its instinct was to do the opposite of whatever Mr Trump had. Work on the border wall stopped. Democrats ditched the remain-in-Mexico policy, which obliged asylum-seekers to stay south of the border until the authorities decided on their applications. Predictably, illegal immigration surged.

Since the midterms in 2022, Mr Biden has quietly adopted some of Mr Trump’s policies. He has agreed to fill gaps in the wall. Asylum-seekers who try to cross undetected will, with a few exceptions, automatically have their applications rejected. They must apply online before showing up. Yet Americans are unaware of these efforts, partly because Mr Biden is loth to draw attention to his triangulation, lest his own side turns on him.

The president’s room to do one thing while saying another is running out. The House of Representatives has paired a stringent immigration bill with funding for Ukraine’s war. The administration resents this, because support for Ukraine makes economic and strategic sense for America regardless of the country’s policy on immigration. That is an error. Instead, in a system in which both parties use the leverage available to them, Mr Biden should see this as an opportunity.

Some of the Republican demands on immigration are sensible. Most migrants without visas who cross at the southern border do not crawl through the desert. They find a Border Patrol agent and present an asylum claim. They must then pass what is called a “credible fear” interview. Republicans want to raise the threshold for what counts as credible fear. That is a reasonable aim. Under Mr Biden’s rules, a fear of gang violence counts as a ground for being let in. Contrast that with Spain, which rejects this test even though it has a socialist prime minister.

Once that first test is passed, immigrants are typically released awaiting a court date years in the future, because immigration courts are overstuffed with cases. The average wait for a hearing is over four years. Appeals can add to the delay. Democrats would like money to hire more officers to process claims and more judges to speed through the backlog of cases. That is reasonable, too.

There ought to be a deal here. Yet each party mistrusts the other’s motives. Republicans say they will not give more money to an administration they cannot trust to enforce immigration laws. Instead they are trying to impeach the secretary of homeland security. Democrats look at Republican demands, such as that families coming into the country can be detained indefinitely, and conclude that negotiations are being set up to fail and are therefore really a weapon against Mr Biden. The odds are that both parties will choose campaigning over dealmaking.

Don’t forget the multitudes

That should worry Mr Biden. Our reporting from the Mexican side of the border suggests that, if people believe Mr Trump will win, many more will try to cross into America before he is inaugurated. Insecure borders weaken support for legal immigration and boost restrictionist parties. Immigration could bring Mr Trump back to the White House, from where he might pull America out of the refugee convention of 1951, causing it to collapse. Mr Biden should call the Republicans’ bluff, roll up his sleeves and set out to fix the border. That would be the right thing to do. It would also help his prospects.

Leaders | AI for all

AI holds tantalising promise for the emerging world

It could help boost human capital, and ultimately growth

image: damien vreznik

Jan 25th 2024

New technology brings with it both the sweet hope of greater prosperity and the cruel fear of missing out. Satya Nadella, the boss of Microsoft, says he is haunted by the fact that the Industrial Revolution left behind India, his country of birth. (Indian manufacturers hardly enjoyed a level playing-field—Britain was then both their rival and their ruler.) Many technologies, such as online-education courses, have generated more hype than economic growth in the emerging world. Some people worry that generative artificial intelligence (ai), too, will disappoint the global south. The big winners so far seem to be a bunch of Western early adopters, as well as startups in San Francisco and America’s “magnificent seven” tech firms, which include Microsoft and have together added an astonishing $4.6trn to their market value since Chatgpt’s launch in November 2022.

Yet ai stands to transform lives in the emerging world, too. As it spreads, the technology could raise productivity and shrink gaps in human capital faster than many before it. People in developing countries need not be passive recipients of ai, but can shape it to suit their own needs. Most exciting of all, it could help income levels catch up with those in the rich world.

The promise of ai in developing countries is tantalising. As in the West, it will be a useful all-purpose tool for consumers and workers, making it easier to obtain and interpret information. Some jobs will go, but new ones will be created. Because emerging countries have fewer white-collar workers, the disruption and the gain to existing firms may be smaller than in the West. The imf says that a fifth to a quarter of workers there are most exposed to replacement, compared with a third in rich countries.

But a potentially transformative benefit may come from better and more accessible public services. Developing economies have long been held back by a lack of educated, healthy workers. Primary-school teachers in India have twice as many pupils as their American counterparts, but are ill-equipped for the struggle. Doctors in Africa are scarce; properly trained ones are scarcer. Whole generations of children grow up badly schooled, in poor health and unable to fulfil their potential in an increasingly global labour market.

As our briefing this week sets out, policymakers and entrepreneurs around the world are exploring ways that ai can help. India is combining large language models with speech-recognition software to enable illiterate farmers to ask a bot how to apply for government loans. Pupils in Kenya will soon be asking a chatbot questions about their homework, and the chatbot will be tweaking and improving its lessons in response. Researchers in Brazil are testing a medical ai that helps undertrained primary-care workers treat patients. Medical data collected worldwide and fed into ais could help improve diagnosis. If ai can make people in poorer countries healthier and better educated, it should in time also help them catch up with the rich world.

Pleasingly, these benefits could spread faster than earlier waves of technology. New technologies invented in the early 20th century took more than 50 years to reach most countries. By contrast, ai will spread through the gadget that many people across the emerging world already have, and many more soon will: the phone in their pockets. In time, chatbots will become much cheaper to provide and acquire.

Moreover, the technology can be tailored to local needs. So far there is little sign that ai is ruled by the winner-takes-all effects that benefited America’s social-media and internet-search firms. That means a variety of approaches could prosper. Some developers in India are already taking Western models and fine-tuning them with local data to provide a whizzy language-translation service, avoiding the heavy capital costs of model-building.

Another idea that is also taking off in the West is to build smaller, cheaper models of your own. A narrower set of capabilities, rather than the ability to get every bit of information under the sun, can suit specific needs just fine. A medical ai is unlikely to need to generate amusing limericks in the style of William Shakespeare, as Chatgpt does so successfully. This still requires computing power and bespoke data sets. But it could help adapt ai in more varied and useful ways.

Some countries are already harnessing ai. China’s prowess is second only to America’s, thanks to its tech know-how and the deep pockets of its internet giants. India’s outsourcing industry could be disrupted, as some back-office tasks are taken on by generative ai. But it is home to a vibrant startup scene, as well as millions of tech developers and a government that is keen to use ai to improve its digital infrastructure. These leave it well-placed to innovate and adapt. Countries in the Gulf, such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, are determined to build an ai industry as they shift from oil. They already have the capital and are importing the talent.

Each country will shape the technology in its own way. Chinese chatbots have been trained to keep off the subject of Xi Jinping; India’s developers are focused on lowering language barriers; the Gulf is building an Arabic large language model. Though the global south will not dislodge America’s crown, it could benefit widely from all this expertise.

Teaching AId

Plenty could yet go wrong, obviously. The technology is still evolving. Computing power could become too expensive; local data will need to be gathered and stored. Some practitioners may lack the ability to take advantage of the knowledge at their fingertips, or the incentive to try new things. Although countries in sub-Saharan Africa stand to gain the most from improvements to human capital and government services, the technology will spread more slowly there than elsewhere without better connectivity, governance and regulation.

The good news is that investments to speed ai’s diffusion will be richly rewarded. Much about the ai revolution is still uncertain, but there is no doubt that the technology will have many uses and that it will only get better. Emerging countries have suffered disappointments before. This time they have a wonderful opportunity—and the power to seize it.

Leaders | Mainstream Meloni

Giorgia Meloni’s not-so-scary right-wing government

Liberal fears have so far proved overblown

image: getty images

Jan 24th 2024

People like labels, and it has always been easy to attach them to Giorgia Meloni, prime minister of Italy since October 2022. She has routinely been dubbed a neo-fascist by her political enemies in Italy and by alarmed liberals across Europe. It doesn’t help that her party, the Brothers of Italy, descends in part from a post-war neo-fascist group, or that its party symbol includes a tricolour flame with questionable antecedents. In the run-up to the election she won, the spread between Italian and German government debt widened, owing to fears that she would pick fights with Brussels and maybe even destabilise the euro itself. She might, critics feared, team up with Hungary’s strongman, Viktor Orban, the nationalist right in Poland and Marine Le Pen in France to cause all sorts of trouble. But 15 months in, Ms Meloni seems to be conventional rather than a wrecker.

Consider, first, all the things that have not happened. Social policy has remained unaltered, despite the Brothers’ hostility to abortion and gay civil unions. It is true that there has been no progress towards gay marriage or same-sex adoption; but neither has there been any backsliding, despite this being Italy’s most right-wing government since the second world war. Italy’s first female prime minister does not profess to be a feminist, but she is a tough single mother who unceremoniously dumped her partner for propositioning his female colleagues.

Nor has Ms Meloni been a thorn in the flesh of her fellow European leaders or the legions of bureaucrats in Brussels whose job it is to worry about the stability of the euro and indeed the European Union itself. Lo spread has shrunk back to around 1.5 percentage points, and the markets show no sign of jitters, despite Italy’s feeble growth. She has not teamed up with Mr Orban or other populists to block eu decision-making, nor attracted the censure of the eu’s rule-of-law watchdogs. On Ukraine she has been admirable, sending money and arms despite Italy’s traditional ties to Russia. Fears that Italy would take a nasty turn towards xenophobia have proved unfounded, despite a sharp rise in the number of asylum-seekers arriving by boat.

Could Ms Meloni be a sign that the populist right is not always so bad once in office? True, Mr Orban has never changed his autocratic spots, and neither did Poland’s Law and Justice party, which voters kicked out in October. It would also be rash to assume that a President Le Pen or, in the Netherlands, a Prime Minister Geert Wilders (a more imminent prospect) would cleave to the mainstream as Ms Meloni has. And yet the Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigrant party, have not done anything terrible since lending support to the ruling bloc in Stockholm. All in all, Ms Meloni makes an encouraging data point: the so-called far right in Europe can turn out in office to behave like run-of-the-mill conservatives.

That does not mean everything is sunny in the land of la dolce vita. Ms Meloni has some bad ideas about constitutional changes that would bolster the power of the prime minister—though those are still for the future. There are also worrying signs that she is at heart no economic reformer, unlike her predecessor, Mario Draghi. Italy’s growth problems are systemic. The new government has shown little interest in promoting competition, played with the idea of a big windfall tax on the banks before dropping it and is seeking to diminish the role of foreign investors on Italian boards. The deficit is ballooning, and the oecd this week warned that spending cuts and tax rises will be needed, a call that will fall on deaf ears. That is disappointing, but resistance to reform in Italy is long-standing. In this, too, Ms Meloni belongs to her country’s mainstream.

United States | Lexington

Why America’s political parties are so bad at winning elections

And why a new party would probably be no better

image: kal

Jan 25th 2024

Every four years the American presidential primaries roll around to remind Americans how weak, clumsy and negative their major political parties have become. The news media’s red-and-blue maps, the repetitive partisan standoffs in Congress and the drama created by the polarisation of the parties create the impression that they hold tremendous sway, that Americans are devoted to either the Democrats or Republicans and obsessed with their prospects. The reality is more muddled and dispiriting.

The largest, and growing, share of Americans choose not to identify with either party. According to a Gallup poll released this month, 43% call themselves independent, tying a record set in 2014. In Gallup’s poll, the proportion of eligible voters identifying as Democrat has fallen to a record low, 27%, the same percentage that call themselves Republican. Another Gallup poll, also this month, found that only 28% of adults, also a new low, were satisfied with “the way democracy is working in this country”.

Stay up to date with our new daily update, The us in brief, and our Republican primaries poll tracker.

Read more of our coverage of the us elections of 2024 here.

Yet the parties are not reacting by making themselves more appealing. Something is interfering with the signals the electorate sends to the organisations that supply candidates and ideas, never more so than this cycle, when most Americans have consistently turned their noses up at the products most likely to be on offer, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

“The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the party that wins this election,” declared Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, as she conceded the New Hampshire primary to Mr Trump on January 23rd. She may be right in theory. But she is wrong in practice that there is some coherent entity called a “party” capable of such a rational calculation. As Mr Trump demonstrated in 2016, and Barack Obama did before him, political parties do not plot or strategise anymore to anoint a candidate, at least not with much effect; they have instead become vehicles idling by the curbs of American life until the primaries approach, waiting for successful candidates to commandeer them.

For most of American history, party leaders picked presidential nominees. That system collapsed after the fractious Democratic convention of 1968, in which party elders ignored the candidate of the anti-Vietnam-war left and instead bestowed the nomination on Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, who had not competed in a single primary. Reformers successfully argued that nominating delegates should be picked by voters in primaries instead, and Republicans eventually followed the Democrats’ lead. This approach opened up the system to candidates, such as Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Ronald Reagan in 1980, who might never have been chosen in a smoke-filled room.

But in taking power from the party establishment, reformers unintentionally handed it to activists, who tend to be more extreme than other partisans, let alone the rest of the country. This is particularly true of the Republican Party. Now, relatively small numbers of impassioned voters can end up choosing nominees.

After Mr Trump won 51% of the vote in the Iowa caucuses this month, he was credited in the news media with a “landslide” win and a “blowout victory”. But it was a frigid night, and fewer than one in six registered Republicans turned out. They were probably among the most motivated of voters, quite unlike most Americans. Mr Trump won about 56,000 of these Republicans, or about 7% of the potential pool of 752,000 Iowa Republicans.

In New Hampshire on January 23rd Mr Trump won most Republicans who turned out, while Ms Haley won most “undeclared”, or independent voters who did so. Political analysts rightly saw this as a weakness of Ms Haley, because in many states independent voters cannot cast ballots in partisan primaries. And it might seem reasonable that the Republicans would want to nominate whoever wins the most Republicans. The flaw in this approach is that, definitionally, that candidate has demonstrated only that they can win if the electorate is Republican. A party capable of organising itself to win a general election with a big majority would place more value on reaching beyond the base.

A party’s nominee may not win the majority even of its primary voters, let alone of its eligible primary voters. The primaries tend to exaggerate the popularity of the eventual nominee because many states award all their delegates to the winner, rather than dividing them proportionately among the candidates. In 2016 Mr Trump won fewer than 45% of primary voters in all—that is, he won the Trumpy minority of the activist minority that turned out.

This is a fragile basis on which to stake a claim to nationwide electability. Nominees overcome that handicap by relying on what political scientists call “negative partisanship”. Though the plurality of Americans call themselves independent, they tend to lean to one party or another. Encouraging these voters, as well as less politically active party members, to see the opposing party as demonic is a reliable means of getting them to vote your way.

Third parties are hard

All this helps explain the longing of certain idealists and opportunists for a third party. That yen is particularly sharp in this cycle. History suggests it could be fulfilled quite suddenly, says Bernard Tamas, a political scientist at Valdosta State University and the author of “The Demise and Rebirth of American Third Parties”. “It’s often at times like this when the two major parties are polarised, because it opens a door for a third party to attack,” he says. “You don’t know if it’s going to happen until it happens.”

But the group No Labels, which is considering a third-party bid, appears to be off to a poor start. Successful third parties have tended to run candidates not just for president but down the ballot, too, and to have specific, galvanising issues. Had Donald Trump been capable of organising such an effort, he might have been a powerful third-party candidate. But why bother, when an existing party was just sitting there waiting to be commandeered?

The Americas | So, so, so scandalous

Colombia’s first avowedly left-wing president is mired in scandal

Gustavo Petro’s son, brother, and former chief of staff are all under investigation

image: reuters

Jan 25th 2024 | BOGOTÁ

Backpacks full of cash, Caribbean condominiums and 1.1bn unexplained pesos ($281,000): these sound like details in a John le Carré novel, not the stuff of court papers. And yet all three appear in the evidence in a criminal case against Nicolás Petro, son of Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first avowedly left-wing president. On January 11th Colombian prosecutors charged Mr Petro junior with illicit enrichment and money laundering. The court rejected his lawyer’s request to scrap the proceedings, and set a trial date for the end of April.

His son’s predicament is part of a constellation of scandals encumbering Mr Petro who, nearly 18 months into office, is facing an uphill battle to win support for his ambitious programme of reforms. As for Colombians, optimism about their leader’s “government of hope” is fading.

Sins of the son

The case against his son goes like this: according to prosecutors, Mr Petro junior, a former regional deputy, took bribes from notorious figures—including a former drug trafficker and the son of a businessman alleged to have links to paramilitary groups—in return for political favours. The crux of the issue is whether the dirty money helped propel his father to power in 2022. Mr Petro junior admitted he had accepted the funds, but says he kept them for himself. The elder Mr Petro has repeatedly denied any knowledge, which his son corroborates. The trial is likely to drag on.

All this has sparked a probe into the government’s campaign finances, entangling Mr Petro’s brother and Ricardo Roa, his former campaign manager. Both deny any impropriety. Meanwhile Laura Sarabia, the president’s former chief of staff, was hauled before prosecutors last week in an offbeat case befitting a telenovela. It involves a lie detector, the alleged wiretapping of a nanny, and another bag of cash. Ms Sarabia also maintains her innocence. To top things off, Congress launched impeachment proceedings against Mr Petro in December, to which his son was recently called to testify. The Supreme Court also wants to hear from him, on yet another case about illicit enrichment.

The scandals cast a “looming shadow” over the rest of Mr Petro’s term, says Sergio Guzmán of Colombia Risk Analysis, a consultancy in Bogotá, the capital. Mr Petro’s approval rating hit 33% in December, according to the consultancy’s aggregated polling data. He now lacks the political clout needed to push through reforms. These include expanding the state’s role in health care, pensions and education.

What happens next depends on what evidence the prosecution presents at his son’s trial. Much also turns on who replaces the outgoing attorney-general, Francisco Barbosa, whose term ends next month. Mr Petro has presented a shortlist of three well-respected women to the Supreme Court. The appointee will oversee the case against Mr Petro junior, as well as others. Legal scrutiny may have compelled the president to offer up a set of nominees pure enough to put him beyond any suspicion of stacking the court in his favour.

Mr Petro’s troubles are not a patch on those of past presidents, however. Prosecutors are still going after former president Álvaro Uribe, for alleged links to paramilitary groups and witness tampering. He maintains his innocence. As long as most of the world continues to criminalise cocaine, the politics of producer countries such as Colombia will remain dirty.

Still, the saga dents the credibility of a leader who in the past has vociferously criticised the ties between politicians and organised crime. Colombians elected him to put an end to the grubby dealings of the country’s political elite. A whiff of narco-cash in his campaign—proven or not—appears at odds with that goal, and weakens the president. Unless Mr Petro turns things around, his “Pacto Histórico” coalition will become just that: consigned to history.

Asia | Banyan

South Korea’s ban on praising the North is ridiculous

The government imprisons a dotty fan of Kim Jong Un

image: lan truong

Jan 22nd 2024

Making someone do porridge (or “eat rice and beans”, to use the Korean expression‎) for expressing their political views is expected of despotic North Korea. It is not generally associated with its prosperous, democratic southern neighbour. Yet Lee Yoon-seop, a South Korean poet, is currently languishing in prison for just this. The 68-year-old was sentenced to 14 months in November for threatening South Korea’s “existence and security”. His crime? Writing a poem in praise of the North.

The law used to prosecute Mr Lee, the National Security Act (nsa), is designed to protect South Korea from spies and traitors. But it also bans South Koreans from visiting or making contact with the North, reading or watching North Korean media or saying anything good about Kim Jong Un’s tyrannical regime. Though South Korea replaced its former military dictatorship with a democracy in 1987, such restrictions on free speech show that some of the generals’ autocratic tendencies endure.

Every country has counter-espionage laws. And if South Korea’s are rather strict, no wonder. Its capital city is in missile range of a nuclear-armed despot who calls it the “principal enemy”. The nsa was modelled on a law designed to quash pro-independence activities during Japan’s occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. Since 2003 there have on average been more than 60 nsa prosecutions a year, often for pretty clear espionage cases. A businessman and an army officer were arrested for allegedly selling military secrets to North Korea. Soldiers in the South have been prosecuted under the act for endangering morale by distributing pro-North propaganda.

But the nsa is too often used to prosecute satirists and raid the homes and offices of leftists. Some cases have been ridiculous. Kim Myeong-soo, a phd student, received six months in prison and a two-year suspended sentence for selling books on North Korea that were widely available in public libraries. A South Korean woman was given a two-year sentence, suspended for four years, for owning recordings of 14 North Korean songs.

This is not Mr Lee’s first offence. But the claim that the sexagenarian posed a threat to South Korea is absurd. His ode was published on a North Korean website. Access to such sites is banned by the nsa and forbidden from a South Korean ip address. More important, it is hard to imagine Mr Lee’s childish verse persuading anyone of the glories of North Korea’s leader. It consists of a list of South Korean problems that Mr Kim, in the poet’s view, would instantly solve given the chance.

Mr Lee’s real offence appears to have been believing his own nonsense. By contrast, police decided not to investigate a man under the draconian law for selling shirts with a smiling Mr Kim and the slogan “Walk a flowery path, comrade”. That was ok, officials said, because he was selling them to make a buck.

Worse, the issue points to a broader authoritarian tendency in the South. Its president, Yoon Suk-yeol, often demonises his political opponents by calling them “anti-state forces”, a phrase inspired by the nsa. Unfavourable press coverage is routinely labelled “fake news” and the offices of offending outlets have been raided. The administration and its allies have sued more press outfits for defamation—which in South Korea can be a crime even when the offending words are manifestly true—in Mr Yoon’s first 18 months in office than any of its three predecessors did during their entire five-year terms.

Yet even a more liberal government would be unlikely to remove the nsa’s illiberal clauses. No administration has made a serious attempt to reconsider it in 20 years. There is very little political support for scrapping the law, point out Steven Denney and Christopher Green of Leiden University. The current administration at least flirted with allowing South Koreans access to North Korean media, but it recently abandoned the idea. The opposing Democratic Party is no more liberal; it previously tried to pass a similar law criminalising praise of Japanese colonial rule.

Mr Yoon talks often about South Korea’s democratic values. They are at the heart of his pitch for the country to be a strategic link between East and West, developed and developing countries. For that reason alone he should take them more seriously. South Korea is undoubtedly a democracy, but not a terribly liberal one so long as it locks up old men for their dotty opinions. Reforming the nsa would be a better rebuttal to the sentiment Mr Lee expressed than banning it.

Asia | Lunar landing

Japan lands on the Moon

This makes Japan the fifth country to achieve the feat

An emissary from Tokyoimage: getty images

Jan 19th 2024 | TOKYO

January 20th was a big day for Japan’s space programme. At 00:20 Japan time, Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (slim), a spacecraft owned by jaxa, the Japanese space agency, made its first Moon landing. Japan is the fifth country—following the landing in August by India’s Chandrayaan-3—to have achieved that feat.

Enthusiasm at jaxa was somewhat tempered. Owing to problems with its solar panels, the spacecraft soon lost its ability to generate electricity. jaxa officials duly announced that they had shut down the space probe’s power after its battery level dropped to 12%. Even so, the landing showed the strength of Japan’s space programme, which has long made scientific contributions through specialisms such as robotics. The lunar landing also underlines the strategic role of Japan, an ally of America, in the new space race.

slim, also known as Moon Sniper, could transform space exploration. Whereas conventional landers touch down within a range of tens of kilometres, slim can land within 100 metres of a target. Such advances are in demand, because decades after the Apollo landings, countries are tilting at the Moon again.

Exploring its south pole is especially important. That region is likely to contain water ice, from which fuel and oxygen could be produced in order to propel further space explorations. To study the Moon’s resources, precision-landing technology will be necessary, says Sakai Shinichiro, slim’s project manager at jaxa.

Rivalry between America and China is one reason for the renewed interest in space. Under its Artemis programme, America plans to send astronauts to the lunar south pole by 2026, and eventually build a habitable base there.

jaxa is building part of a lunar-orbiting station for Artemis, known as Gateway, which is intended to be a transit point to the Moon and Mars. China also aims to land astronauts on the Moon by 2030, and to build a lunar base. Bill Nelson, nasa’s chief, has warned that China might try to dominate the Moon’s resources, perhaps turning the lunar south pole into “another South China Sea”.

Given such geopolitical pressures, Japan’s long-standing programme has become more associated with defence. A law adopted in 1969 limited the country to using space only for peaceful purposes. That constraint was eased in 2008 with the passage of the Basic Space Law. In June 2023 the government established its first space-security policy, a ten-year road map for expanding information-gathering for missile defence and securing a safe environment for satellites.

Japan’s strengths are better suited to non-military ventures, however. Last year the government said it would establish a ¥1trn ($6.8bn) space fund. That is modest compared with spending by America and China. Still, Japan has made decent contributions by “carving out niche strengths”, including unmanned missions, says Tokaji Ayumu, a former jaxa engineer. In 2010 Japan’s Hayabusa spacecraft became the first to take samples from an asteroid and bring them to Earth.

The slim project draws on jaxa’s previous lunar-orbiting mission, by the spacecraft Kaguya. It created “the most detailed” topographical model of the Moon to date, according to nasa. slim uses machine-learning to analyse high-resolution maps of the Moon’s craters produced by Kaguya, to identify potential landing-spots. jaxa decided to send slim to the Shioli crater on the near side of the Moon, because rocks in the area might contain minerals from the Moon’s mantle. Studying them could help explain the Moon’s origins.

Despite the power-generation problems, slim successfully deployed two rovers, which managed to take a picture from the Moon and send it back to Earth. After an initial investigation, jaxa’s engineers have concluded that the spacecraft was not crippled, but has tilted westwards, away from the Sun. That holds open a possibility that the craft could yet start generating power. The engineers say they are now “preparing for recovery”.

China | Chaguan

Xi Jinping looks abroad for confidence

The West’s wobbles have China feeling vindicated

image: chloe cushman

Jan 25th 2024

When xi jinping looks out at the world, he seems to see history’s arc bending his way. As war in Ukraine slides towards a frozen stalemate, and intensifying horrors stalk the Middle East, Communist Party leaders sound confident that they know how to solve such crises, and that most of the world agrees with them. China puts its trust in interests coldly weighed and balanced, and in economic development. It declines to judge even the most blood-soaked tyrants and denies that universal values exist, calling them a ploy to stigmatise non-Western civilisations.

In the telling of Mr Xi’s chief diplomats, events are now vindicating that chilly realism. Pragmatic, predictable China, they assert, understands what is needed to bring peace and enjoys growing respect in the developing world. They draw a contrast with Western governments that bluster about upholding moral principles, then leave poor countries to pay the price as conflicts drive millions from their homes or as sanctions cause food and fuel prices to spike. Seen from Beijing, liberal democracies are being torn apart by political arguments. America, China’s still-fearsome rival, seems ever more tempted by isolationism, starting in Ukraine. Moreover, Western unity is being sorely tested by the American government’s support for Israel in its war with Hamas, and would be shattered by Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

Lately, China’s geopolitical swagger has been on display. In December Mr Xi addressed an agenda-setting party conference on foreign affairs. As explained this month by the party’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, the speech showed how Mr Xi, using “head-of-state diplomacy”, is charting the right course for a “profoundly changing” world. In Mr Wang’s words, Mr Xi is guided by his “extraordinary political wisdom” and his ability, as the leader of a Marxist party, to spot deep historical forces at work. As often with the party, bland-sounding slogans conceal some large ambitions. Mr Wang talks of China promoting “universal security”. That is code for opposing American-led defence alliances such as nato (because in China’s view, alliances leave members more secure than non-members, destabilising the world). “True multilateralism” is jargon for China’s preferred world order, in which the five permanent members of the un Security Council, namely America, Britain, China, France and Russia, must consent to all interventions by the international community. It also involves developing countries, led by China, having more say generally.

A large majority of countries welcome Mr Xi’s calls for “an equal and orderly multipolar world and a universally beneficial and inclusive economic globalisation,” says Mr Wang. As an astute, Beijing-based diplomat notes, that chewy mouthful is actually a pre-emptive attack on a second Trump administration. Ahead of the American presidential election in November, China is presenting itself to the world as a champion of equality and order, in opposition to America First selfishness and chaos. It is also casting itself as an advocate of free-flowing commerce, determined to battle Trumpian trade barriers and export controls (never mind that China jealously guards access to its own markets).

In recent summit meetings with foreign leaders, diplomatic eyewitnesses report, Mr Xi has conveyed, or sought to convey, the confidence of a man who believes that destiny is on his side. Barely glancing at his prepared talking points, a serene-sounding Mr Xi has offered history lessons to visitors. In one meeting, he recalled the crisis in the 1960s when Soviet experts left Mao-era China, taking their know-how (including nuclear expertise) with them. That turned out to be an “opportunity”, Mr Xi averred. It obliged China to build its own industries. American export curbs will be an opportunity for the same reason, he predicted.

Since Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2022, Chinese officials have scoffed that Western unity over the war would not last. Now, with American aid in the balance, a well-connected scholar contrasts China’s cool-headed analysis of the conflict with the “emotional” approach of European politicians. China is not motivated by deep trust in Mr Putin, says the scholar. Instead, it has all along been seeking to “lay down a marker” that the West cannot pursue its own interests without limit, for example by enlarging nato, and expect a great power such as Russia to accommodate it.

As for the Middle East, party leaders call China a “reliable mediator” in that region, thanks to its emphasis on trade and security, and its non-judgmental way of letting each government seek its own independent path to prosperity. Mr Wang contrasts this “Chinese way” with selfish actors (he means America) who believe in “force being omnipotent”.

Swagger’s harder without swag

There are principled reasons to fear the illiberal, interests-based order that Mr Xi seeks. It would offer aggressors like Mr Putin impunity and a veto over his neighbours’ security. China, for that matter, has its own destabilising regional ambitions. But a slowing economy might impose its own constraints. At his first foreign-affairs work conference as party chief, in 2014, Mr Xi explicitly linked diplomatic success abroad with ambitious targets for China’s gdp growth and rising incomes at home. Reports of the latest conclave on foreign affairs mention no economic promises.

A painful question looms. In 2020, during the covid-19 pandemic, Mr Xi reportedly urged officials to grasp the trend that “the East is rising while the West is declining”, contrasting China’s orderly virus controls with chaos abroad. The phrase is still in use. The People’s Daily, the party’s official mouthpiece, cited it on January 18th. Just now China is cocky about the second half, involving Western decline. But the first half about a rising East should induce anxiety. China faces economic headwinds. To date the party’s response is policy drift. Will Mr Xi be able to bestride the world, taking advantage of American introspection, if his economy stalls at home? As Marxists should know, history’s arc can bend back.

Middle East and Africa | A region on fire

The ever-expanding Middle East war

Ten countries have now been dragged into the fighting

image: alicia tatone/getty images

Jan 24th 2024 | DUBAI AND JERUSALEM

If you drew a diagram of who is shooting at whom in the Middle East, it would look increasingly like a bowl of spaghetti. What began in October as a war between Israel and Hamas has now drawn in militants from four other Arab states. In addition Iran, Israel and Jordan all bombed Syria this month. Iran also unexpectedly bombed Pakistan, which must have wondered how it got dragged into this mess.

Now nearing its fifth month, the war in Gaza seems far from an end—despite a growing sense in Israel that the fighting has got bogged down. The Israeli army has yet to find the top leaders of Hamas, or most of the Israeli hostages that the group is still holding. Israeli security officials worry that bargaining will undermine the military gains they have made.

Read all our coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas

Since October 7th the Middle East’s three strongest powers have all had to reassess their security doctrines. Israel’s military primacy was shaken. Iran’s proxies have become a liability for their patron. And America has been dragged back to a region it wanted to leave. None is sure how to proceed. As the Gaza war drags on, a messier regional conflict keeps expanding.

On January 20th Iranian-backed militias in Iraq fired a big volley of rockets and ballistic missiles at America’s al-Asad air base in western Iraq. Most were intercepted by Patriot air-defence batteries, but some hit the base and wounded Americans and Iraqis. The barrage followed days of Iranian attacks across the region: at alleged terrorists in Syria and Pakistan, and at a supposed Israeli spy base in Iraqi Kurdistan (killing a Kurdish businessman at home with his family). The strike on Pakistan invited a retaliatory attack on Iran, though both sides now seem keen to avoid further fighting.

These incidents signal deep unease within the Iranian regime. Israel is waging a not-so-secret war against it, assassinating members of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Syria and commanders of Hizbullah, an Iranian-backed Shia militia, in Lebanon. At home, meanwhile, a series of terrorist attacks has rattled Iran’s government, among them a double suicide-bombing claimed by the jihadists of Islamic State that killed around 100 people.

For decades Iran has cultivated a network of proxy militias to project power across the region. Yet now it is struggling to deploy them while simultaneously keeping itself out of the conflict. It has tacitly accepted the battering of Hamas, which seems to have carried out its massacre in Israel without alerting its Iranian patrons. Iran has been loth to unleash Hizbullah, its most effective proxy, lest America or Israel hit Iran directly. Attacks on commercial shipping by Yemen’s Houthis have brought an American-led military coalition to the Red Sea. Iran would like to force Israel into a ceasefire in Gaza and drive American troops out of the region. Its proxies have so far achieved the opposite.

Yet America is also trying to find a balance. President Joe Biden has been cautious: he does not want to be drawn into another war in the Middle East, certainly not in an election year. In Iraq and Syria, American forces respond far less often than they are attacked. The American campaign against the Houthis began only after repeated warnings and a un Security Council resolution condemning the group’s attacks on shipping. Mr Biden admits that strikes have not deterred the Houthis—but also says they will continue.

His best hope is that Israel will soon wind down its war in Gaza, which many of his allies have been demanding for months. Yisrael Katz, Israel’s foreign minister, met his European counterparts on January 22nd to discuss what happens after the war. Diplomats in Brussels said the two sides talked past each other. The Europeans wanted to talk about who would govern and rebuild Gaza, and how they might pursue a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians.

Mr Katz, however, touted a pet project to build an artificial island off Gaza’s coast that would serve as a seaport, something he promoted during a stint as transport minister in 2017. His interlocutors were stunned: “This didn’t have much to do with what we were discussing,” said Josep Borrell, the eu’s top diplomat.

Arab states, meanwhile, are quietly promoting their own plan to end the war. Saudi Arabia would agree to normalise relations with Israel in exchange for a commitment to create a Palestinian state. Gulf states are wary of being saddled with responsibility for a ruined Gaza but are willing to support the Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the West Bank, if it resumes control in Gaza .

The plan is a long shot—not least because Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, is a longtime opponent of Palestinian statehood. After Mr Biden spoke with him earlier this month, the president suggested Mr Netanyahu might be amenable to creating a demilitarised Palestine: “I think we’ll be able to work something out,” he said. Mr Netanyahu rushed to rebuff him, insisting that Israel would have to control everything west of the Jordan river, asserting that such a position was “contrary to a Palestinian state”.

Israel has withdrawn many of its troops from northern Gaza, leaving one division to search for tunnels and prevent Hamas from regaining a foothold there. A second division is holding the line between northern and southern Gaza, while a third has encircled Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, the site of heavy fighting in recent days. The Palestinian death toll has passed 25,000, the majority civilians, with probably thousands more yet to be counted. The un says one-fifth of children under five have diarrhoea.

But Mr Netanyahu’s battle for political survival is still dictating Israel’s strategy—and the fate of the hostages in Gaza. The first hostage deal between Israel and Hamas, which freed 110 Israeli and foreign captives at the end of November, was brokered by Qatar; Egypt played a supporting role. There are still 136 hostages, though Israel presumes at least 29 are dead. Now Egypt is leading the push to free them, largely out of economic self-interest.

The chaos in the Red Sea has caused only modest economic damage to Israel. Most of its sea trade goes through Mediterranean ports. Egypt has paid a bigger price: it has seen a 40% reduction in revenue from the Suez canal, a vital source of hard currency. That has added to fears of a possible default in a country struggling with dollar shortages and buried under a pile of government debt (93% of gdp). The Egyptian pound has dropped to around 60 to the dollar on the black market, down from 50 last month and 50% below the official rate.

Egypt does not think that American-led strikes on the Houthis will deter the group from its attacks on ships. For Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, the country’s president, the only way to get his canal working again is a ceasefire in Gaza. To that end Egypt has taken the lead in indirect talks between Israel and Hamas, though the Qatari channel is still open as well.

The deal Egypt is promoting would come in two stages. First would be a “humanitarian” release of civilian hostages in return for a truce that could last several weeks, perhaps even a month or two. Israel would also free hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. The second stage would free captive Israeli soldiers in exchange for a full ceasefire, an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the release of even more Palestinians, probably thousands of them.

These conditions are dividing the Israeli government. Its more pragmatic wing, led by Benny Gantz, a former defence minister who joined the war cabinet in October, supports a lengthy truce to free the hostages. This group wants to pair that with negotiations for a new government in Gaza: leaving Hamas in power would be anathema to most Israelis. But Mr Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition partners adamantly oppose any ceasefire. Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, said on January 24th: “We cannot agree to stopping the war at this stage for such a long period.”

Twisting and turning

Mr Netanyahu, as usual, is prevaricating while he tries to keep both parts of his government on board. In public he promises to “continue until total victory”. In private, he has allowed Israel’s representatives to continue negotiating. But he is unlikely to do anything that would drive away the far right, without whom he would not have returned to office in December 2022.

Hamas is also divided over the deal. Its political leaders, shuttling between Doha and Cairo for talks, are in favour of accepting the first stage of the agreement: they are aware that holding civilian hostages continues to damage their cause. But the leaders in Gaza want an Israeli withdrawal before another release of hostages. Their demand that Israel free Hamas terrorists who took part in the October massacre is another potential deal-breaker, since Israel is highly unlikely to accept that condition.

Mr Netanyahu may have to make a decision soon, though. In an interview broadcast on January 18th Gadi Eisenkot, a war-cabinet member and former army chief, hinted at a push for early elections. “We need, in the time range of months, to go back to the Israeli voter and renew trust,” he said. It is now a matter of time before the emergency war cabinet is dissolved. Protests in Israeli cities are growing. Many are led by the families of hostages calling for a ceasefire—and for Mr Netanyahu’s resignation. His centrist partners are likely to leave the coalition if they do not soon get an answer on a hostage deal and Israel’s post-war strategy. “Until then, it’s deadlock,” says an Israeli security man. “The political leadership won’t make a decision, and if they don’t, a lot of the gains we achieved at great cost will be eroded.”

Europe | So far, so good

Giorgia Meloni has proved the doubters wrong

But Italy’s hard-right prime minister has troubles ahead

image: getty images

Jan 23rd 2024 | ROME

At the start of a year in which she will face her first real test of popular opinion at the European Parliament elections in June, Giorgia Meloni will be hoping for some cheer from growth figures out next week. She is unlikely to get any. The last reckoning showed the economy had grown by a bare 0.1% in the 12 months since Italy’s hard-right prime minister took office in October 2022. Nicola Nobile of Oxford Economics, a forecasting group, says quarter-on-quarter growth in the last three months of 2023 may even have turned negative.

No blame has so far attached to Ms Meloni’s stewardship. Nor should it yet. The economy was hit badly by the pandemic, and its recovery seemed sure to peter out. More recently it has faced new difficulties, notably from the energy crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the lack of growth is one of two clouds in an otherwise largely clear sky. The second is a surge in the irregular immigration that Ms Meloni’s right-wing coalition is bent on curbing. The number of arrivals from the Mediterranean rose to almost 160,000 last year, a 50% increase on 2022 and the highest figure since the peak year of 2016. The government is hoping to divert some boats to holding centres in Albania. But the plan has run into legal challenges there.

image: the economist

Otherwise Ms Meloni is “increasingly in command of the scene”, says Lorenzo Castellani, who teaches politics at luiss, a university in Rome. Her coalition has a comfortable majority and remains united, despite squabbles. Recent polls give the prime minister’s Brothers of Italy (fdi) party almost 29%, compared with only 9% for the Northern League led by Matteo Salvini and 7% for Forza Italia, bereft of its founder, Silvio Berlusconi, who died last June. Efforts by Mr Salvini to claw back support lost to the Brothers by adopting an increasingly hardline stance have not so far given the League better ratings. The opposition is split between the centre-left Democratic Party (pd) and the smaller and populist Five Star Movement. Polls suggest Elly Schlein of the pd is the least popular of Italy’s main party leaders.

Relations with Italy’s nato allies are good. Italy has given enthusiastic backing, and arms, to Ukraine and rather more muted support to Israel. It has also kept Brussels happy enough for the European Commission to continue providing regular dollops of the €194bn ($211bn) allocated to Italy from the eu’s covid-19 recovery fund—by far the most to any member state. But banking cash is one thing, spending it another. Concern over Italy’s ability to disburse its windfall is growing. An investigation by Openpolis, an ngo in Rome that promotes transparency, shows that only €2.5bn was actually spent in 2023.

The expected stimulus to the economy when the money does eventually hit its mark is a big reason why no Italian debt has been sold off, despite rising interest rates and a deficit that has ballooned since 2019. Another is that the European Central Bank (ecb) made clear in June 2022 that it would not tolerate a much wider spread between Italian interest rates and those of Germany, the bloc’s benchmark. But the ecb, like the commission, expects continued structural reforms in exchange for its support. It is far from clear that Ms Meloni’s government is keen to make them.

image: the economist

One of the biggest obstacles to enterprise—and to foreign direct investment—is the delay businesses encounter in resolving disputes and recovering debts. Marta Cartabia, justice minister in the previous administration of Mario Draghi, introduced procedural changes and a programme of digitisation, and hired some 8,500 junior lawyers as clerks. The time it takes to resolve a civil case has fallen by almost 20%. As a result, the backlog is down by more than a third.

The current government has stuck to those changes, but its own contribution to speeding up not only the courts but also the use of the eu’s largesse is controversial. A bill before parliament would abolish the crime of abuse of office. One of its aims is laudable: to do away with the reluctance of officials to sign off on projects because they fear inadvertently falling foul of the law by, say, awarding a contract to a firm that later turns out to be a mafia front. But in a country permeated by the influence of organised crime, the bill has prompted squeals of protest from lawyers and ngos. It has drawn criticism from Brussels, too.

Liberalisation of the economy is also problematic. That is nothing new. Every conservative Italian government for the past 30 years has balked at defying the vested interests that would suffer from deregulation. The League in particular has fought tooth and nail to shelter Italy’s small, often family-run, businesses from competition. But in the case of Ms Meloni’s government, there is a new element: her own party is inspired by an economic philosophy that is protectionist, corporatist, statist and critical of free markets.

Ministers have repeatedly intervened, or tried to intervene, in the operation of markets. They have tried to limit surge pricing on some air routes and to slap a windfall tax on the banks’ extra profits from inflation. They also plan to skew corporate governance in a way that would diminish the influence of foreign direct investors. No privatisations are in the offing, though Ms Meloni insisted on January 22nd that the treasury could raise €20bn within three years through part-privatisations that did not endanger state control. Nor has there been any serious move towards realising the state’s vast real-estate assets. All of which poses the question of how the government, which passed an expansionary budget for 2024, intends to reduce—or at least contain—its gross debt stock of around 140% of gdp. This week the oecd warned that Italy would need to cut spending, raise taxes, or both.

Of all the countries in Europe, Italy is for once among those prompting least concern. But its government’s biggest challenges mostly lie in the future. It has to find a way to curb unauthorised immigration if it is to appease its voters, and spend the recovery money faster if it is to satisfy Brussels. Above all, it needs a strategy for growth that goes beyond just throwing eu cash at the economy. “If we cannot lift the growth rate,” warns Francesco Giavazzi, who was Mr Draghi’s economic adviser, “we are in trouble.”

Business | Bartleby

Why you should never retire

Pleasure cruises, golf and tracing the family tree are not that fulfilling

image: paul blow

Jan 25th 2024

In an episode of “The Sopranos”, a popular television series which started airing in the 1990s, a gangster tells Tony, from the titular family, that he wants to retire. “What are you, a hockey player?” Tony snaps back. Non-fictional non-criminals who are considering an end to their working lives need not worry about broken fingers or other bodily harm. But they must still contend with other potentially painful losses: of income, purpose or, most poignantly, relevance.

Some simply won’t quit. Giorgio Armani refuses to relinquish his role as chief executive of his fashion house at the age of 89. Being Italy’s second-richest man has not dampened his work ethic. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s sidekick at Berkshire Hathaway, worked for the investment powerhouse until he died late last year at the age of 99. Mr Buffett himself is going strong at 93.

People like Messrs Armani, Buffett or Munger are exceptional. But in remaining professionally active into what would historically be considered dotage, they are not unique. One poll this year found that almost one in three Americans say they may never retire. The majority of the nevers said they could not afford to give up a full-time job, especially when inflation was eating into an already measly Social Security cheque. But suppose you are one of the lucky ones who can choose to step aside. Should you do it?

The arc of corporate life used to be predictable. You made your way up the career ladder, acquiring more prestige and bigger salaries at every step. Then, in your early 60s, there was a Friday-afternoon retirement party, maybe a gold watch, and that was that. The next day the world of meetings, objectives, tasks and other busyness faded. If you were moderately restless, you could play bridge or help out with the grandchildren. If you weren’t, there were crossword puzzles, tv and a blanket.

Although intellectual stimulation tends to keep depression and cognitive impairment at bay, many professionals in the technology sector retire at the earliest recommended date to make space for the younger generation, conceding it would be unrealistic to maintain their edge in the field. Still, to step down means to leave centre stage—leisure gives you all the time in the world but tends to marginalise you as you are no longer in the game.

Things have changed. Lifespans are getting longer. It is true that although the post-retirement, twilight years are stretching, they do not have to lead to boredom or to a life devoid of meaning. Once you retire after 32 years as a lawyer at the World Bank, you can begin to split your time between photography and scrounging flea markets for a collection of Americana. You don’t have to miss your job or suffer from a lack of purpose. If you are no longer head of the hospital, you can join Médecins Sans Frontières for occasional stints, teach or help out at your local clinic. Self-worth and personal growth can derive from many places, including non-profit work or mentoring others on how to set up a business.

But can anything truly replace the framework and buzz of being part of the action? You can have a packed diary devoid of deadlines, meetings and spreadsheets and flourish as a consumer of theatre matinees, art exhibitions and badminton lessons. Hobbies are all well and good for many. But for the extremely driven, they can feel pointless and even slightly embarrassing.

That is because there is depth in being useful. And excitement, even in significantly lower doses than are typical earlier in a career, can act as an anti-ageing serum. Whenever Mr Armani is told to retire and enjoy the fruits of his labour, he replies “absolutely not”. Instead he is clearly energised by being involved in the running of the business day to day, signing off on every design, document and figure.

In “Seinfeld”, another television show of the 1990s, Jerry goes to visit his parents, middle-class Americans who moved to Florida when they retired, having dinner in the afternoon. “I’m not force-feeding myself a steak at 4.30 just to save a couple of bucks!” Jerry protests. When this guest Bartleby entered the job market, she assumed that when the day came she too would be a pensioner in a pastel-coloured shirt opting for the “early-bird special”. A quarter of a century on, your 48-year-old columnist hopes to be writing for The Economist decades from now, even if she trundles to her interviews supported by a Zimmer frame; Mr Seinfeld is still going strong at 69, after all. But ask her again in 21 years.

Business | Schumpeter

Can MSCI drag private markets out of the shadows?

Meet the Nicaraguan revolutionary behind the world’s favourite index supplier

image: brett ryder

Jan 25th 2024

Henry fernandez was once a counter-revolutionary. The man who over three decades has built msci, a provider of stockmarket indices, into a standard bearer of financial globalisation, started his career as a Nicaraguan diplomat in the government of Anastasio Somoza, a right-wing dictator. While some of his friends flocked to the left-wing Sandinistas ahead of the revolution that toppled Somoza in 1979, he took a look at socialism in eastern Europe and decided it was doomed to fail. Instead, he embraced free-market capitalism and moved to Wall Street.

There he encountered a different revolutionary movement that he has championed ever since: the forward march of capital markets. Starting in the Reagan era, he has played a role in several of the upheavals that have swept the world of finance, from securitisation in the 1980s and the growth of emerging-market investing in the 1990s, to the rise of index tracking and exchange-traded funds (etfs) this century. He retains an idealistic streak. While many former advocates of environmental, social and governance investing have shied away from the climate-related fad of the past half-decade, he remains a true esg believer.

He is now betting that msci’s indices can penetrate the opaque world of private finance—the $12trn-plus of assets held in private equity, credit, venture capital, real estate and infrastructure. These are some of the hottest segments of the capital markets. But they are restricted to institutions and well-heeled investors. In these secretive markets asset managers are loth to encourage more transparency and liquidity lest their fees suffer as a result. Yet technology may be moving in Mr Fernandez’s favour.

msci, which was spun off by Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, in 2007 and has a market capitalisation of $45bn, has two main lines of business. The first is benchmarking. It has more than 280,000 equity indices around the world that tell investors what is going on in the public markets, and provide a measuring stick against which to judge fund managers’ performance. If a fund puts all its money into small-cap Japanese stocks, for instance, and msci’s medium- and large-cap Japanese equity indices do better, it underperforms. Almost $15trn of assets are benchmarked in such a way globally.

The second line of business is enabling investment managers to sell low-cost portfolios, such as etfs, based on its indices. Almost $1.5trn of etf assets are linked to msci’s indices, a nearly five-fold increase in a decade. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is the biggest client. Its boss, Larry Fink, and Mr Fernandez have been kindred spirits for decades.

msci’s first foray into the private realm is via benchmark indices. Since 2021 it has spent almost $2bn buying two data-gathering firms that create indices for private assets, from real estate and infrastructure to private debt. As Mr Fernandez explains, such indices enable a property investor to decide the relative merits of putting money into, for example, offices (which crashed during the pandemic) versus data centres (which soared). Gathering such information is tricky because many of the transactions are not publicly disclosed. msci creates indices by sourcing data from investors in private funds, who in turn receive records of those funds’ quarterly performance, including valuations of the underlying assets, from the asset managers. Its most recent acquisition, for instance, gives it data from about 13,000 private funds, representing $15trn in cumulative investments.

Could these benchmarks eventually form the basis for indices used by etfs to bring private markets to the masses? It seems hard to imagine. Private assets do not trade with anything like the frequency of listed assets. They also lack the liquidity necessary for passive funds whose investors may want to redeem their money at short notice.

And yet Mr Fernandez believes that some parts of this opaque hinterland, such as private loans, are more liquid than others. “My bet is that over time there will be the development of a secondary market for private credit,” he says. To explain why, he goes back to his days as a young trader at Morgan Stanley during the “Liar’s Poker” era of the 1980s. The market for mortgage loans was fledgling and illiquid until the thrifts that made home loans came under pressure to sell them. Wall Street firms like Salomon Brothers and First Boston (where Mr Fink headed the mortgage desk) scooped them up, turned them into mortgage-backed securities and sold them to investors, creating a highly liquid secondary market. Similarly, banks that underwrite loans today face regulatory pressure to limit the size of their balance-sheets, so they sell some of the loans to firms with private-credit arms, such as Apollo and Blackstone. Mr Fernandez thinks that, as with the mortgage market, this trade could lead to a secondary market that would, eventually, have enough liquidity for index funds.

A big breakthrough will require advances in technology. For that, Mr Fernandez has his eye on his veteran comrade-in-arms, Mr Fink. This month BlackRock launched its first bitcoin etf, and Mr Fink, who seldom keeps his cards close to his chest, hinted that this may be the start of a prolonged foray into the cryptoverse that could eventually encompass private assets. “If we could etf a bitcoin, imagine what we could do with all financial instruments,” he told Bloomberg tv. “Everything is going to be etfed.”

ETFs or WTF?

Mr Fernandez notes that Mr Fink has become an advocate of “tokenisation”—the idea that financial assets and their owners can be registered on a blockchain-like ledger, which could make it easier to trade property and other private assets. It is an idea in its infancy. Some people think it is barmy. The msci boss confesses that for the time being he himself does not fully understand it. But in contrast to the Sandinistas, who have betrayed everything they once fought for, his revolutionary zeal remains as strong as ever.

Finance and economics | Buttonwood

Investors may be getting the Federal Reserve wrong, again

Why expectations of imminent interest-rate cuts could be misplaced

image: satoshi kambayashi

Jan 24th 2024

The interest-rate market has a dirty secret, which practitioners call “the hairy chart”. Its main body is the Federal Reserve’s policy rate, plotted as a thick line against time on the x-axis. Branching out from this trunk are hairs: fainter lines showing the future path for interest rates that the market, in aggregate, expects at each moment in time. The chart leaves you with two thoughts. The first is that someone has asked a mathematician to draw a sea monster. The second is that the collective wisdom of some of the world’s most sophisticated investors and traders is absolutely dreadful at predicting where interest rates will go.

Since inflation began to surge in 2021, these predictions have mostly been wrong in the same direction. They have either underestimated the Fed’s willingness to raise rates or overestimated how quickly it will start cutting them. So what to make of the fact that, once again, the interest-rate market is pricing in a rapid loosening of monetary policy?

image: the economist

This time is different, and in an important way. A year ago investors betting that rates would soon be cut were fighting the Fed, whose rate-setters envisaged no such thing. Then, in December, the central bank pivoted. Rate cuts were now being discussed, announced Jerome Powell, its chairman, while officials forecast three of them (or 0.75 percentage points’ worth) in 2024. The market has gone further, pricing in five or six before the year is out. It is, though, now moving with the Fed, rather than against it. Mr Powell, in turn, is free to make doveish noises because inflation has fallen a lot. Consumer prices rose by just 3.4% in the year to December, compared with 6.5% in the year before that.

Yet the past few years have shown how eager investors are to believe that cuts are coming, and how frequently they have been wrong. And so it is worth considering whether they are making the same mistake all over again. As it turns out, a world in which rates stay higher for longer is still all too easy to imagine.

Begin with the causes of disinflation to date. There is little doubt that rapidly rising interest rates played a role, but the fading of the supply shocks that pushed up prices in the first place was probably more important. Snarled supply chains were untangled, locked-down workers rejoined the labour force and soaring energy prices fell back to earth. In other words, negative supply shocks gave way to positive ones, cooling inflation even as economic growth rebounded.

Yet these positive shocks are now themselves fading. Supply chains, once untangled, cannot become any more so. America’s participation rate—the proportion of people in its labour force—increased from 60% in April 2020 to 63% last August, but has since stopped rising. Meanwhile, energy prices stopped falling early last year. And escalating violence in the Middle East, where America and Israel risk being drawn ever further into conflict with proxies and allies of oil-producing Iran, could yet cause prices to start rising again. All of this leaves monetary policy with more work to do if inflation is to keep falling.

At the same time as America’s participation rate has stopped rising, wages have continued to climb. According to the Atlanta Fed, in the fourth quarter of 2023 median hourly earnings were 5.2% higher than a year before. After adjusting for inflation, this is well above the long-run annual growth rate for workers’ productivity, which has been a little over 1% since the global financial crisis of 2007-09. A gap between wage and productivity growth will, all else equal, continue to force up prices. For the Fed, this makes rate cuts harder to justify.

The case that rates may stay high is therefore plausible even if you ignore the political backdrop. In an election year, that is a luxury which central bankers do not have. The danger of easing monetary policy too early and allowing inflation to come back, as happened in the 1970s, already looms over the Fed. During a presidential campaign featuring Donald Trump, cutting rates too quickly could have even graver consequences. The cry would inevitably go up that officials had abandoned their mandate in an attempt to juice the economy, please voters and keep Mr Trump out of office.

And Mr Trump may well win, in which case he will probably pursue deficit-funded tax cuts, driving inflationary pressure yet higher and forcing the Fed to raise rates. Such a scenario is still, just about, speculative fiction. It is certainly not what investors expect. But when you look at their predictive record, that is hardly a comfort.

Finance and economics | Free exchange

The false promise of friendshoring

America, China and Europe appear to be trading less with their geopolitical rivals

image: alvaro bernis

Jan 25th 2024

Each year the 193 member states of the United Nations General Assembly vote on dozens of resolutions, earnestly setting the world to rights. Last month, for example, they voted in favour of reducing space threats, eradicating rural poverty and combating dust storms, among other things. The votes count for little. The assembly’s resolutions are not legally binding. Its budgetary powers are small. And it has as many military divisions as the pope.

But for scholars of international relations, these votes have long provided a handy, quantitative measure of the geopolitical alignments between countries. More recently, economists have also turned to them. Owing to the trade war between America and China, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the conflict in Gaza and recent blockades in the Red Sea, geopolitics has become impossible for dismal scientists to ignore. Although their models of trade and investment typically give pride of place to the economic size of countries and the geographic distance between them, they are now considering “geopolitical distance” as well.

The latest such study was published this month by the McKinsey Global Institute, a think-tank attached to the consultancy of the same name. By analysing countries’ votes on 201 of the higher-profile resolutions between 2005 and 2022, McKinsey was able to plot countries’ geopolitical stances on a scale from zero to ten. America stands at one end of the spectrum, labelled zero. At the other end is Iran at ten. In between are countries like Britain at 0.3, Brazil at 5 and China at 9.6.

The authors use this measure to provide a new perspective on each country’s trade. As well as measuring the average geographical distance that a country’s trade must travel, they also calculate the geopolitical distance it must traverse. In a hypothetical world in which half of Iran’s trade was with America and half with Brazil, its trade would cover a geopolitical distance of 7.5.

Their results are illuminating. European countries trade mostly with one another. As a consequence, their trade for the most part flows to their friends and neighbours. Things are rather less comfortable for Australia, however. It must trade with countries that are both geopolitically and geographically remote.

America is somewhere in between. Thanks in part to its continental size, it has few prosperous neighbours. Less than 5% of global gdp is generated by countries within 5,000km of America, as McKinsey points out. Its trade travels almost 7,200km on average, compared with 6,600km for China’s trade and a global average of less than 5,200km. Yet in the diplomatic realm, the world is not so far away. The geopolitical distance America’s trade must cover is only a little above the global average. It is far shorter than the diplomatic distances bridged by China. Indeed, China’s trade covers a greater geopolitical gap than that of any of the other 150 countries in McKinsey’s data, bar Nicaragua, which resents America, but is doomed to do business with it.

The study finds some early evidence of “friendshoring”. Since 2017, America has managed to shorten the geopolitical distance covered by its trade by 10%, on McKinsey’s scale. It has, for example, sharply curtailed imports from China, although some of the goods it now buys from other countries, such as Vietnam, are full of Chinese parts and components. China has also reduced the geopolitical distance of its trade by 4%, although that has required it to trade with countries farther afield geographically.

Yet the report identifies several limits to this trend. Much of the trade countries carry out with ideological rivals is trade of necessity: alternative suppliers are not easy to find. McKinsey looks at what it calls “concentrated” products, where three or fewer countries account for the lion’s share of global exports. This kind of product accounts for a disproportionate share of the trade that spans long geopolitical distances. Australia, for example, dominates exports of iron ore to China. Likewise China dominates exports of batteries made from neodymium, a “rare-earth” metal.

The attempt to reduce geopolitical dangers may also increase other supply-chain risks. Friendshoring will give countries a narrower range of trading partners, obliging them to put their eggs in fewer baskets. McKinsey calculates that if tariffs and other barriers cut the geopolitical distance of global trade by about a quarter, the concentration of imports would increase by 13% on average.

For countries in the middle of the geopolitical spectrum, friendshoring has little appeal. They cannot afford to limit their trade to other fence-sitters, because their combined economic clout is still too small. Countries that score between 2.5 and 7.5 on McKinsey’s scale—a list that includes rising economies such as Brazil, India and Mexico—account for just one-fifth of global trade. To avoid falling between two stools, they must seek to trade across the geopolitical spectrum, just as they do now.

Friendshoring has limits for China as well. There are simply not enough big economies in its geopolitical orbit to compensate for reduced trade with unfriendly Western trading partners. For China, then, friendshoring is more about replacing rivals and antagonists with more neutral parties among the non-aligned world, such as in Central Asia and the Middle East.

Check mate

In studying how trade might contort itself along geopolitical lines, the McKinsey study assumes that the lines themselves remain fixed. But as the report freely admits, that might not be the case. The invasion of Ukraine and the conflict between Israel and Gaza is already causing new divisions and allegiances. It is conceivable that non-aligned countries might move closer to China politically, as China embraces them economically. Certainly, by spurning Chinese trade and investment, the West would give China added incentive to ingratiate itself with the rest of the world. After all, there are two ways to shorten the geopolitical distance of trade: trade more with friends or make more friends to trade with.

Science and technology | Aesop’s ecological fables

How ants persuaded lions to eat buffalo

A tale of elephants, thorn trees, and the sensitivity of ecosystems

For want of ants, the trees were lostimage: brandon hays

Jan 25th 2024

“The ant and the zebra” sounds like the title of one of Aesop’s fables. Like all good fables, this one has a moral, which is that tinkering with nature has unpredictable consequences. Unlike the Greek originals, though, which were allegories, this fable is real.

The story plays out in Laikipia county, Kenya, not far from the mountain which gave that country its name. The characters include big-headed ants (an invasive species of obscure origin), the native acacia ants these interlopers have gradually been replacing, the whistling-thorn trees in which both sorts of ants live, a cast of elephants, lions, zebras and buffalo, and Douglas Kamaru, a Kenyan biologist who currently has a berth at the University of Wyoming. As Mr Kamaru and his colleagues report this week in Science, the ant invasion has triggered a convoluted chain of consequences which has helped zebras at the expense of buffalo—thus neatly illustrating a phenomenon called “trophic cascade”.

It works like this. Whistling-thorns have co-evolved with the local ants. The trees provide the ants with shelter and food, in the form of large, hollow thorns into which they secrete nutritious nectar from special glands. The ants, meanwhile, protect the trees by seeing off the chief threat to them, the local elephants, which are not keen to browse trees crawling with biting insects.

Acacia ant strongholds are thickly carpeted with whistling-thorns. Big-headed ants, however, are not so good at keeping the elephants at bay. The pachyderms move in and munch the trees, removing much of the area’s cover. That discombobulates the local lions, which often use this cover to hide when hunting zebra. To compensate, the lions switch to hunting buffalo, which are more dangerous, but less fleet of foot.

Mr Kamaru has put numbers to the process, too. In invaded areas, elephants browse and break trees five to seven times as often as in uninvaded ones. And in those uninvaded places, zebra kills are almost three times as frequent as in the invaded ones. Indeed, between 2003 and 2020, as the big-headed ants have spread, the proportion of local lion kills where the victim was a zebra fell from 67% to 42%. Conversely, over the same period, the proportion of kills that were buffalo rose from zero to 42%. Whether the buffalo blame the ants for their misfortune, no one knows.

Culture | The comeback kid

Which colour and material is most in vogue in 2024?

It is enjoying a resurgence in design and fashion

image: getty images

Jan 19th 2024

After years in the doldrums, brightly reflective chrome finishes are back, gleaming in the spotlight. Pinterest, a pictorial social-media network, noted an appetite for “cool silver tones and bold chrome” in its annual trend report, “Pinterest Predicts”. Architectural Digest, House Beautiful and Kaiyo, an online second-hand furniture marketplace, all foresee a renewed interest in chrome in interiors.

In popular culture, shiny metallic finishes are key to the punkish retro-futurist aesthetics of the “Mad Max” film series and “Fallout”, a popular, post-apocalyptic game series, both of which have adaptations coming out in 2024. (“Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga”, arrives in cinemas in May; “Fallout”, on Amazon Prime in April.) The revival is also under way in fashion. Beyoncé sported high-shine silver costumes and accessories by Boss, Lanvin and Mugler during her gold mine of a tour in 2023. Wide-brimmed chrome hats worn by the singer and her dancers during the performance of the song “Formation” were pivotal props, obscuring and illuminating body parts.

Chrome became popular in the 1920s, with the rise of the Modernist and Art Deco movements. On the one hand, its bright, reflective surface made it feel glamorous, futuristic and fresh in the wake of the heavy, dark interiors popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was used by Syrie Maugham, a British interior designer who was influential in the 1920s and 1930s. She popularised white rooms layered with reflective surfaces like chrome lamps and mirrored screens.

On the other hand, chrome has an industrial edge, particularly when applied to metal tubes. According to Deborah Sugg Ryan, professor of design history at the University of Portsmouth, this dovetailed perfectly with the idea of a house as a machine for living in, a philosophy espoused by Le Corbusier, an architect. Chrome was a natural choice for Bauhaus designers including Eileen Gray, Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe, who lavished it on furniture, lighting and interior fixtures. As Ms Sugg Ryan points out, it was just as popular on the mass market, giving everything from cigarette lighters to picture frames a burst of Hollywood éclat.

From the 1950s, Harley Earl, head of design at General Motors, an automobile company, drove chrome to prominence once again. According to Earl’s biographer, Stephen Bayley, he believed the average American consumer wanted big, flashy cars that reflected confidence. He developed an entire language of design that not only applied to gm’s Chevrolets, Oldsmobiles and Pontiacs but came to influence all kinds of unrelated consumer goods, from radios and cigarette cases to bar stools. An apprentice who worked with Earl in the 1950s recalls him advising gm’s designers to “lay on chrome with a trowel”. But consumers grew sick of surfeit. By the mid-1960s chrome lost its shine and became decidedly déclassé until a brief, spirited revival in the 1980s.

Trends in design tend to be cyclical, so chrome’s re-emergence after years of brass, bronze and rose gold is perhaps no surprise. However, the world is rather different from what it was during the first “chrome rush” a century ago, when a glitzy taste for the colour reflected a booming economy in America and optimism about the future. Today there are wars in the Middle East, Sudan and Ukraine and unease about the climate, politics and inflation. The world’s mood is sombre and grey.

The current taste for chrome could be due to pragmatic considerations. Both fashion and interiors are in the midst of a boom in upcycling and buying second-hand, which is more environmentally friendly. And while mid-century modern furniture has become highly sought after and more expensive, prices for furniture from the Art Deco period and 1980s remain more affordable. Chrome also reflects a lot of light, which is useful when living in smaller spaces.

Still, it is impossible to dismiss the idea that chrome’s return in design is also about nostalgia, escapism and fantasy. Dreams of a brighter tomorrow, like chrome, never entirely lose their lustre.

Culture | Sing it again

“Mean Girls” and the rise of the film-turned-musical-turned-remake

Musical films are hitting a high note

Queen bees and high Csimage: capital pictures

Jan 22nd 2024

“Mean girls” became a hit film in 2004 by showing how hard it is to be popular. But the remake of the film, now out in cinemas, is itself part of the in-crowd: it is one of a spate of films that became a stage musical and is now a musical film.

“The Color Purple”, based on Alice Walker’s Pulitzer-prizewinning novel, is also out in cinemas. The book was adapted into a film in 1985 and became a stage musical in 2004. “Wicked”, a musical that follows two witches from “The Wizard of Oz” (1939), has been seen by more than 65m theatregoers. The first instalment in a two-part film adaptation will be released in November.

Tina Fey, an actress who wrote both scripts for “Mean Girls”, is following Mel Brooks’s lead. He turned “The Producers” (1967)—his Oscar-winning satirical film about the world of musicals, aptly enough—into an acclaimed stage show in 2001, then into a middling film in 2005. Roald Dahl’s “Matilda” also jumped from screen (1996) to stage (2010) to screen again (2022), with the most recent instance accompanied by music and uplifting choreography.

These films are a reflection of Hollywood’s interest in safe bets. Something like “Mean Girls” offered assurance to financial backers, who could count on attracting new viewers as well as people who had seen the original film and musical. But there is more to the trend than financial calculation. As with Disney’s live-action remakes of 20th-century cartoons, retellings offer an opportunity to update a story according to the mores of the moment. When “Mean Girls” was first released in 2004, thefacebook.com was just three months old; gossip spread by word of mouth back then, not direct message. In her new version, Ms Fey grapples with Instagram and TikTok.

Whether the trend continues depends, of course, on how the current clutch performs at the box office. If the films succeed, there are lots of musical hopefuls waiting in the wings. It may not be long before “Groundhog Day”, “Pretty Woman” and “Some Like It Hot” make their cinematic encores.

Obituary | The wrath of God

Zvi Zamir oversaw a programme of Israeli assassinations

The former director of Mossad, who oversaw a programme of covert assassinations, died on January 2nd, aged 98

image: flash90

Jan 25th 2024

He would never forget what he saw at Munich. Zvi Zamir had always been a details man. Even when he was head of Mossad, his reports were meticulous. He noted everything, success and failure alike. But particularly failure: that he felt keenly. And the 1972 Olympics, when some of the Israeli team were taken hostage, offered such terrible details, and so much failure.

Such as the fact that the Germans had started their “rescue” shoot-out at night, with no lights. Useless. He could hardly believe that blunder. There were other memorable details, too. Such as the way the blood of the dead had pooled on the tarmac. And the way the screams of the captured Israelis could be heard, as the terrorists started shooting. And the way they had all, finally, fallen silent. Until the day he died, he would never forget Munich.

He hadn’t been intending to go to the games at all. Zamir was head of Mossad; he had other things to do. Besides, the games had hardly looked like a threat. The Munich Olympics were the biggest yet: 121 countries, 7,134 athletes, 80,000 spectators in the main stadium alone, all there to see humanity be faster, higher, stronger. But also, Germany hoped, better. It was now 30-odd years since the 1936 Berlin Olympics; these games would show the world how Germany had changed. The militarisation of the last games had gone: none of these guards carried guns; the perimeter fence didn’t even have barbed wire on it. These were “The Games of Peace and Joy”.

Though not everyone was joyful. Or peaceful. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation had sent a letter to the Olympic Committee asking for Palestinians to compete but no one had even replied. So they had decided to take part in their own way. During that long, hot July in the Libyan desert, the Palestinians had therefore also practised for the games: running, sprinting, jumping. Over fences. Off walls. Again and again. Faster, higher, stronger, until—athletes of assault—they too were ready for Munich. Until they were ready, above all, for the perimeter fence.

In the end, the fence wasn’t a problem at all. Later, Zamir would be caustic about the Germans. They were useless, he said, useless all the way—but it was Americans who had let the terrorists in first. A little after 4am, on the morning of September 5th, some drunk American athletes saw the Palestinians trying to climb the fence with their bags of guns, and had just helped them over.

The mood at Munich had been like that: open, friendly, “wonderful”, as one Israeli athlete said. The Israeli team had relished the atmosphere; they’d loved speaking to people from all countries. As another Israeli, Andre Spitzer, had joyfully told his wife: this was what the games were all about. Spitzer would be one of the last of the Israelis to be shot. Machine-gunned by the Palestinians as he had sat, with his hands tied, unable to move.

The first hostage was killed much more swiftly. A little after 4.10am, the Palestinians were in the Olympic camp. Shortly after 4.30am, they were in an Israeli apartment. By 5.30am, they had dumped the first Israeli body on the pavement outside. Then, fluttering down on pieces of paper from the window, they had announced their demands: the release of 234 prisoners in Israeli jails, or one hostage would be killed every hour.

By 5.30am, Golda Meir, the prime minister of Israel, was awake; by 11am she had refused the demands: this was “blackmail of the worst kind”. If she gave in, “no Israeli anywhere in the world will feel that his life is safe.” The Israelis offered instead to send a team to help rescue the hostages; the Germans refused: they had this. That was when Meir told him to go to Munich. Zamir must be there to watch the Germans, she said. To see “how they rescue our team”.

So he had gone. The Germans hadn’t been happy about it: his presence bothered them. They even tried to bar him from the Olympic village. But Zamir was not a man to be easily put off. He might be quiet, tight-lipped even, but he had been an elite military commander and he was now head of Mossad. And an effective one: it was he who would warn Israel that the Yom Kippur war was about to begin. He could handle Olympic officials.

Finally, the Germans let him in and he started to watch. He watched as they laid a complicated rescue plan and then prepared for it, badly. Their intention was to pretend to allow the Palestinians to fly out—then to ambush them on the plane. He watched as the Israeli hostages were taken away to lay the trap. That was the moment that he never, ever forgot. Standing on German soil, and watching Jews, shackled, being led away. It was an appalling sight.

And he kept watching, as first his belief in German efficiency died and then as all the hostages did. The so-called “plan” was a mess: the German snipers had no bulletproof vests, no helmets, no lights. Unbelievable: he would have had the field flooded with light. He watched, horrified, as it all went wrong: as the helicopter exploded, as the hostages were machine-gunned, as the blood pooled and, finally, silence fell. And he watched as, somehow, the wrong news was announced and news agencies reported that all the Israeli hostages had been freed. Then he telephoned a happy Golda Meir and said to her: “Golda…I have bad news.”

Munich changed everything. The time for watching was over. No longer, he said, would Israel sit idly by. Now the Israelis were “going to get the people who did this”. Meir echoed his determination: wherever a plot was being woven, wherever anyone was planning to murder Jews—that is where they must strike. “Operation Wrath of God”, as it would become known, had begun. Like the actual wrath of God, it was swift and it was terrible. There was a shooting in Rome, a bombing in Paris, another bomb in Cyprus. Meir was delighted.

Her critics were less pleased. Operation Wrath of God was, some said, as fierce and at times as inaccurate as its name implied. Though for others, such vengeance felt almost inevitable. As Meir herself said, if there was one thing that the “blood-drenched history” of the Jewish nation showed, it was that violence that began with the murder of Jews would spread “violence and danger to all people, in all nations”. There would, there could, be no escape.